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Obama says 'dots' not connected in airline attack

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama asserted on Tuesday
that the U.S. government had enough information to foil the
attempted bombing on a Christmas Day airline flight but
intelligence agencies "failed to connect the dots."

Obama called that unacceptable and said, "I will not tolerate
it." The accused attacker, a Nigerian man who claimed ties to
al-Qaida, was subdued by other passengers and airline crew members
after he allegedly attempted to detonate explosives hidden under
his clothes.

The president, speaking after meeting with his Cabinet and
national security team, declared, "We have to do better and we
will do better. And we will do it quickly."

Obama also said he was suspending the transfer of Guantanamo
detainees from Yemen. The Christmas attack has raised concerns
about Yemen, because the Nigerian man has claimed to have been
acting on instructions from al-Qaida operatives in that country.

Nearly half of the 198 detainees held at Guantanamo are from
Yemen. But Obama reiterated his vow to eventually close the prison
camp in Cuba.

He spoke after a White House meeting with the high-ranking
government officials charged with carrying out two reviews he has
ordered . Obama spelled out recent changes in security protocols
for airline flights and changes to the government's watchlist of
suspected terrorists.

Obama told reporters the security lapse didn't have to do with
the collection of information but with the failure to integrate and
analyze what was there. The bottom line, he said was that the
government had "sufficient information to uncover this plot and
potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack."

"Our intelligence community failed to connect those dots which
would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list," he said. "This
was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to
integrate and understand the intelligence that we already have."

Obama said that it was clear the government knew that the
suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had traveled to Yemen and
joined with extremists there.

"It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other
red flags that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike
not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself.
And we had information that this group was working with an
individual ... who we now know was in fact the individual involved
in the Christmas attack," he said.

As for the prison for terror suspects in Cuba, he said, "Make
no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison," Obama said.
Guantanamo, he said, "was an explicit rationale for the formation
of al-Qaida" operating in Yemen.